Former UCLA player Lynn Shackleford waves during ceremonies honoring his 1967-68 NCAA championship team at halftime of the game with the California Golden Bears on March 8, 2008 at Pauley Pavillion in Westwood, California. (Stephen Dunn/Getty Images)

ANAHEIM, Calif. — Showing the unerring judgment and shrewd instincts of a UCLA basketball player in the ’60s, Lynn Shackelford lives in Austin, Texas.

He’s with Touchstone Golf, a company that develops and manages various courses.

“But that’s not why I moved here,” Shackelford said Wednesday. “I just wanted to get out of the L.A. traffic and live in a great college town.”

The Bruins flew to Austin on Wednesday night and will play Minnesota on Friday in the NCAA Tournament. Shackelford will be playing in a golf event in Houston.

“If they win I’ll see them on Sunday,” he said.

That, in itself, shows the ravages of the years.

IF UCLA wins? Shackelford’s teams could have put the NCAA Finals on their preseason pocket schedules.

He was the left-handed gun on the ’67, ’68 and ’69 teams that won three NCAA championships and 88 of 90 games overall. Lew Alcindor was the proximate cause, of course, but Shackelford, Lucius Allen and Kenny Heitz were pretty good, too.

They were the nucleus of the top three-year run in tournament history. In ranking the 74 previous champs, ESPN nabbed the ’68 Bruins first, the ’67 Bruins fourth and the ’69 Bruins ninth.

“I think there are some people within UCLA that would put a couple of Bill Walton’s teams higher than some of ours,” said Shackelford. “But, yeah, we were pretty good.”

The ’68 team also erased its only loss in chart-busting fashion. UCLA had lost “The Game Of The Century” to Houston, in the Astrodome, after Alcindor had been hospitalized because of a cornea injury.

The two met in the NCAA semifinals at the Sports Arena, and the Bruins rolled, 101-69, as Shackelford, not particularly airworthy at 6-foot-5, was told to guard Elvin Hayes.

Everything else has changed, too. Not only did Alcindor & Co. stay at UCLA until graduation, they weren’t allowed to play as freshmen. Nobody was, until 1972.

Imagine Shabazz Muhammad, Jordan Adams and Kyle Anderson on their own freshman team. Quadraple that, and you might come close to the excitement that the 1966 freshmen sparked at UCLA.

Especially when they christened Pauley Pavilion by plastering the varsity, 75-60.

“Lucius stole the ball on the first possession and went down for a layup,” Shackelford said, “and Joe Chrisman just turned and said, ‘Boy, this is going to be a long night.’ ”

It was. Alcindor got 31 points and 21 rebounds, and Gary Cunningham, coaching the freshmen, emptied the bench so as not to embarrass John Wooden.

“We went into our locker room and everybody was laughing and celebrating,” Shackelford said. “Down the hall, they could hear us. Their locker room was quiet. Everybody had his head down.

“Coach was pacing up and down. Then he looked up and said, ‘Well, at least we’ll be pretty good next year.’ Which was typical of him, always looking at the positive. But that was the final varsity-freshman game.”

The Brubabes played other freshman teams, plus junior colleges, including MiraCosta, which they beat by 104. Their closest margin of victory was 28.

Varsity competition wasn’t much different. The ’67 and ’68 Bruins had an average point differential of plus-26.

Alcindor, as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, became the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, and Allen played 10 years in the NBA. Shackelford played 22 games for the Floridians of the ABA.

“Teams played a lot of zone against us so I always had a lot of room to shoot,” said Shackelford, who shot 48.2 percent for his career and averaged 9.7 points. “I had this high-arching shot. We had some high wires behind our house (in Burbank) and I would have to shoot it over the wires, and to get it up high I had a different motion, but Coach never tried to change it.

“I probably shot more than most kids, but I didn’t play year-round. I was on the golf team in high school, too. In those days UCLA was turning down players. (Assistant coach) Jerry Norman handled all the recruiting, and he’d watch all my games, even as a 10th grader. UCLA was winning, so I didn’t consider anywhere else.”

He kept playing golf, and his son Geoff played at Pepperdine. “It was something we could do together, and it probably wouldn’t have been good for him to play basketball with that name,” Shackelford said.

Now Geoff is a respected golf writer and author of “The Captain,” the definitive biography of Riviera architect George Thomas.

Lynn had a rare reunion with his teammates at Heitz’s funeral last year. “We keep up,” he said. “There’s email.”

Still, life was simpler when, on a weekend in mid-March, you always knew where your Bruins were.

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